Last Fantasy Volume 1

Creative Hon & Yong-Wan Kwon

TokyoPop

2 February 07

Two heroes in a fantasy RPG like setting, trying to survive, have adventures and accidentally make as many enemies as they can in the process. Tian is a magician who dropped out of school early because of a lack of funding. This has left his abilities as a magician very limited, but he can sure throw a mean fireball. Drei, or to give him his full title ‘Drei von Richenstein’, is the tall, strong handsome warrior many girls dream about. The only problem is that he’s as dumb as gravy. Drei also has an ‘Enchanted Voice Sword’ which is tremendously huge and frequently pokes fun at Tian.

Other characters that pop up in Last Fantasy generally don’t stay for too long before either getting killed or going from friend to foe, normally because of the guys ‘quick thinking’ and ‘good ideas’. The character feature I’m not too fond of is how quickly Tian changes from the smart responsible hero to the money hungry almost villainous type. At times when we see the characters close up, it’s because of this quick change of personality that is can be tricky to tell Drei and Tian apart.

Art-wise, Last Fantasy is one of the most spectacular mangas I’ve ever seen. Each page has excellent detail and some amazing drawings that show how much time and effort has been put into it. We get the occaisional SD and chibi change, but these help to add to the comedic aspect of the manga. My one criticism is that with so much going on in most panels, audiences who skim-read will miss out on the finer details. But this would be the fault of the reader, not the artist and writers.

Last Fantasy (whose title appears to say ‘Final Fantasy’ with the word ‘Final’ covered in a read cross with ‘Last’ put over it), is a left to right read manga, so those who are used to traditional Japanese books will have to take note which way to read. It also contains the small featurette ‘The Makings of Last Fantasy‘, where we see just what went into the overall creation of Last Fantasy. This featurette is mainly text-based, so not too enjoyable for those who don’t like to see blocks of text.

In my opinion, Last Fantasy was a good time filler. It has possibilities to expand in many ways and each chapter offers the reader a sense of closure so you’re not as desperate to wait for the next in the series to come out. Although there was some brilliant displays of artwork, it just didn’t thrill me as much as other’s of a similar genre. However like I tell everyone, each of us has a different view so I still urge you to read it and decide for yourself.